2022 election campaign: serious politics or bad reality TV?

As the credits roll on the nation’s 47th election, the reviews are already describing Election Campaign 2022 as a lacklustre reality TV show that didn’t quite meet viewers’ expectations.

But what will be remembered are the few storylines and character plays that made this a campaign to study into the future.

The use of the American political playbook, in advertising and language and leadership, will top that talk.

The rise of the teal independents, and how they fare on Saturday night, will also be a crucial factor – or at least should be – as both main parties navigate a policy future.

And the frustrating lack of discussion and vision around big policy areas like health and education will surely be the mark of ongoing voter reviews.

UQ Professor of Politics and Public Policy Katharine Gelber nominates the stand-out feature as the way smaller, emerging parties tried “to adopt a playbook from the US”.

UQ lecturer in the School of Economics Dr Vera te Velde raised the same trend as colouring Election Campaign 2022. She sees the rise in identity-based politics having been aggravated by two factors: a pandemic which divided society and the wide-spread use of social media. 

“Social media is exacerbating some of these identity issues because it becomes a platform where people can express their preferences,’’ Dr Vera te Velde says.

UQ political scientist Dr Frank Mols says even the theme of “freedom’’, used by the United Australia Party was an “American-type rip-off’’.

Just a thought – but perhaps Clive Palmer’s big spending also falls into that category. The fruits of his $85 million spree will soon become clear: can his United Australia Party win a presence in Parliament after spending almost double the main parties?

Dr Mols says making policy on the run, which meant it might never be implemented, appeared to be something “endemic in the Australian system’’. It’s something that has also coloured this election campaign.

The appeal of the teal independents will be the first thing Dr Mols monitors on election night. And while polling points to success for this new political brand – particularly in Melbourne – increased competition for that vote meant nothing was guaranteed.

UQ social scientist Professor Paul Henman says the teal independents have challenged the Coalition, which had failed to respond.

Both parties had also failed to ignite serious discussion in the policy space. Anthony Albanese played a small target, particularly after early gaffes over the cash and unemployment rates, Professor Henman says. And Scott Morrison adopted different approaches in a bid to capitalise on voters’ concerns. 

For example, the Liberal leader helped promote the transgender moral panic of one candidate, before dropping it. He admitted he needed to be less of a ‘bulldozer’ in his approach – and then summarily dismissed concerns of eminent jurists over the proposed integrity commission.

Director of research in the UQ School of Economics Professor Brenda Gannon says evidence-based policy always provided the best results. And this campaign was marred by both a lack of broad discussion and the involvement of experts.

While the problems with aged care had been raised, the focus on fixing them has been isolated, and didn’t address the system as a whole.

“It’s not just about money,’’ Professor Gannon says. Strategy was also crucial so that the changes could be delivered. 

With still a few hours to go, the reviews are more two-star than five-star, meaning Election Campaign 2022 is more Survivor than Australia’s Got Talent.

Where will the ‘frustrated’ vote land?

Followers of British history, or The Crown on Netflix, will know Michael Fagan; the unemployed man who broke - not once, but twice, into the Queen’s apartment in 1982.

While his ingenuity can be admired, perhaps, The Crown portrays Fagan as a crestfallen and jobless painter struggling as unemployment turned up and the economy turned down.

It also showed the immeasurable chasm between the lives of ordinary people, and those seeking their vote, to govern on their behalf.

Margaret Thatcher, at least in the televised version, meets the Queen later in a multi-million pound palace sitting room to discuss the British triumph in the Falklands War, which encouraged a surge in popularity for the prime minister.

“If unemployment is temporarily high, Ma’am, then it is a necessary side effect of the medicine we are administering to the British economy,’’ Mrs Thatcher tells the Queen.

People vote for all sorts of reasons – from leadership to a single local issue – but on polling day, most undecided voters will choose the political or party that best serves them, their family and their beliefs.

This campaign has shone a spotlight on the high number of undecided voters, peaking at more than one-in-four, and at the level of individual ‘frustration’ being felt; and while it might not mirror that felt by Fagan in 1982, it’s just as real.

It comes on top of cost-of-living increases, lacklustre leadership and a COVID legacy that fans out much wider than our health system.

And the Liberals’ explanation that raising interest rates will moderate strong growth sounds as empty as Thatcher’s unemployment rate rationale.

So where will that ‘frustrated’ vote land? Will it swing back to the government which has based its campaign around economic management and social security? To the devil we know. Or to the one we don’t: Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party, which has had years in opposition pondering how it might government differently?

Or will it travel outside the two main parties, boosting teal independents and smaller parties from the Greens to One Nation and the United Australia Party?

UQ political scientist Dr Frank Mols says that as the poll nears, the margin will narrow and some undecided voters will move back to the main parties, including the ‘devil’ they know. “It’s not that they’ve become more trusting – it’s driven by negative partisan identity,’’ he says. That means they see it as preferable to vote for one party, to shut the other out.

In Victoria and NSW, some undecided voters will land on teal independents and in Queensland, where they are not represented strongly, the Greens and other moderates might become the beneficiary. 

So why should Scott Morrison hold the Liberals’ campaign launch in Queensland? Dr Mols’s answer suggests Scott Morrison might be facing a challenge on two fronts: teal candidates interstate, but in Queensland, the right fringe of the Liberal Party could move away from the government.

UQ political scientist Dr Glenn Kefford  says that’s important in the context of a broader picture which could see the Liberals realise losses in WA and northern Tasmania, for example.

Like Dr Mols, he says the swag of undecided voters will diminish as many move back or decide to give the alternative big party a chance at government. 

But a second phenomenon was in operation too. “In political science terms we refer to it as dealignment.’’ Here, voters sever the tie with one of the major parties. No longer “committed partisans’’, they see value in lodging their vote elsewhere.

This was also supported in academic literature, he said, as over time both the vote for minor parties and independents has climbed and the strength of voters’ ties with the major parties weakened.

Fishing for votes – Labor launches its campaign

If you’re a surfer, you go surfing where the big waves break. If you’re a shopper, you go shopping where the bargains are plentiful. And if you’re a fisher, you go cast your line where the big fish bite.

And that’s what Anthony Albanese did this weekend on his COVID comeback with his metaphorical fishing expedition to Western Australia.

Albanese, an aspiring prime minister, is a politician fishing for votes and he chose Perth to officially launch his campaign (which has actually been running for two years) because it’s in the state where Labor hopes it can gain three of the seven seats it needs to win to take government on May 21.

Albanese cast his net wide, not only flattering West Australians with his attention but baiting his line with the vote-winning issues that appeal to his heartland: relief from barriers to housing through a publicly funded housing subsidy and similar support for those who need it to pay for medicines, child care and transport.

And, of course, there’s the opportunity to appear progressive – in Labor’s case through a program to electrify more cars, support minerals industries that will feature in new technology and to make progress on reconciliation.

Campaign launches truly are a wonderful moment in the sunshine for political leaders. They get to preach to the converted and are surrounded by their parties’ past heroes. 

Albanese had both former Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Paul Keating, just as Scott Morrison will have John Howard, maybe Tony Abbott but certainly not Malcolm Turnbull.

While they guarantee a chance to sell a pure message, carefully workshopped and rehearsed, the target audience isn’t the swinging voters but the party faithful who react to the call to arms with the intensifying of political activity you will see over the next three weeks.

And, by going to WA, Albanese hasn’t just set out to put a marker on a few seats but has aligned himself with the popular Mark McGowan, who is Labor’s rockstar leader of the moment.

McGowan, a UQ graduate who forged his professional and political career in Perth, can barely do a thing wrong in WA – and is the only state ally Labor has so far put alongside Albanese. To labour the fishing analogy, he’s the burley bringing the prey to the bait.

As much as we’d all like the closing weeks of an election campaign to be about policy and about the future of the nation, it’s inevitable that it will stray to the personal and negative. We saw some of this with Albanese yesterday who contrasted the known elements of his team with the government - the “inexplicable’’ Barnaby Joyce, the “unspeakable’ – Alan Tudge and the “unthinkable’’ Peter Dutton.

This will light up the Labor base and encourage it to go out and get the extra votes (and seats) it needs to form majority government.

The latest polls show each side still has a battle to get there. It’s still far too early to fire up the barbie.

In the balance

Be prepared for some serious horse-trading, once night falls on May 21.

All election campaigns bring twists and turns, but at this point – with more than one-in-four voters undecided – a hung Australian Parliament looks like the shortest odds.

That simply means that no party has enough MPs in the House of Representatives to pass laws. The party forming government would need to negotiate successfully with other parties or Independent MPs to form a coalition, or become very adept – as a minority government – at negotiation, to pass its plans.

“A vote for independents ... is about uncertainty and instability in incredibly uncertain times," Mr Morrison  says. “It's the Forrest Gump principle: you just never know what you're going to get.”

Anthony Albanese, likewise, isn’t interested in talking to those who might further wreck his chance of taking the big job. “There will be no deal with the independents and crossbenchers,” he says.

But would a hung parliament be the ogre they are painting?

No, says UQ political scientist Dr Glenn Kefford. Indeed, it might even enhance democracy. 

Dr Kefford has studied the first hung Commonwealth Parliament and minority government for 70 years – and that was in 2010, when both the ALP and Coalition won 72 seats each. 

(That meant each side needed an extra four MPs to gain a majority; a feat eventually won by Labor – the Gillard Government – which secured the support of the Australian Greens and three of the four non-aligned independent members).

Dr Kefford says minor parties and independents can seek to change the culture and inclusivity of Parliament. More Private Members’ Bills, for example, might be introduced. More questions might be asked. And certainly more cooperation, and less confrontation, is likely.

Of course, the promises made by the two leaders this week of no deals is code for ‘no deals before the election’. On May 22 – or even in the background before that – strategies will be nutted out to give each side the best chance if they need to fight post-poll for the treasury benches. 

But the value of independents and minor parties runs further than the role they might play, if elected. Already, at a local level, they are turning attention to policy and asking both big parties how they would address questions they would rather not answer.

Climate change is an example, with the role played by the well-heeled so-called teal independents who are taking on moderate Liberals in inner-city seats. And on the Labor side, the heat is being applied to candidates in Central and North Queensland over extractive industries.

A frustration with the major parties has also led to a burst of rural independent candidates – including former mayors – putting up their hand. And unlike former elections, where they might have sided with a party, many of these candidates are running on their own.

Add to that the low primary vote being recorded for both parties, and the high numbers of undecided voters, and it is understandable that the threat posed by minor candidates appears to be the only issue on which Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese agree.

“Normatively, this is good for democracy,’’ Dr Kefford says. And he’s spot on. We are seeing new pathways and new opportunities to police the policies of the major parties - and that’s happening at the national level where the parties are hoping to control the narrative, and at the local level where voters will attend the ballot box.

That doesn’t mean the next parliament will balloon with independent or minor party MPs, and indeed most of their influence will be seen prior to voting day. (Although Pauline Hanson will almost certainly now defeat controversial Queensland Senate candidates including Campbell Newman, to return to the Upper House.)

But what the increased voice of independent and minor party MPs does mean is that we now have a better chance to ensure policies are debated and discussed as part of the daily campaign diet.

And that has to be a win for all voters.

Who might make the best leader? The devil you know or the devil you don't?

With policy debates taking a backward step early on in this campaign, the focus is squarely on the two men, with as many similarities as differences, vying for the top job.

So how – after all this time – has it come down to a leader many don’t like, and a leader many don’t know?

UQ Psychology Professor Alex Haslam says while some leaders are keen to make a campaign about themselves, “neither Morrison nor Albanese want to make it about themselves – for different reasons.’’

Morrison was challenged by his “capacity to lead’’ over recent difficult times, enveloping floods, fires and an ongoing pandemic. And while he might like to claim credit for the nation’s handling of the pandemic, voters put that squarely down to State leaders.

Albanese was pitching himself as a “working class bloke’’, like the voters he hopes will support him. “But we don’t know him,’’ Professor Haslam says. “We don’t know if he’s one of us.’’

The Labor leader bristles each time he is asked whether voters really know him or his values. He’s had a biography done, he says. And he’s been in the public eye forever.

Despite that, polls are still showing close to 40 percent of voters still don’t have a strong take on who he is, or how he might lead the nation.

Other politicians have made similar mistakes – John Hewson couldn’t explain the GST on cake in 1993 and Annastacia Palaszczuk in 2015 ‘passed’ in a radio quiz question about the GST rate – but UQ political scientist Dr Frank Mols says it is how the stumble is handled that determines the likely fallout.

Dr Mols, who specialises in political psychology, says the first time Albanese failed to answer the question about the cash rate, he didn’t engage – and remained in control. He faltered when he tried to answer the second question about the jobless rate – and couldn’t.

But it won’t have the impact it did in 1993, when John Hewson lost the “unlosable election’’. Albanese fans would “gloss over it’’, his detractors would have a field day on social media about it, but the news cycle now meant it would unlikely be fatal.

Would others be better? Josh Frydenberg? Tanya Plibersek? It’s irrelevant because as voters, we don’t get a say. And that means, to many, it is a contest between the devil we know and the devil we don’t.

Rusted-on Liberal voters will always support Morrison. Devoted Labor supporters will see Albanese as deserving the top job. And it will be “those in the middle, who are not following politics as closely’’ who will end up the decision-makers, according to Professor Haslam.

Scott Morrison needs to prove he is better than his opponent. Anthony Albanese needs to look better than the guy who’s got the job he wants.

The problem with that focus on personality is that it ignores policy debate, where a contest of ideas can inspire and drive the plans which should provide a blueprint for a nation looking forward.

How much are candidates spending on social media?

The UQ Election Ad Data Project reveals the social media spending trends of candidates and parties during the 2022 campaign. It was designed by Associate Professor Gianluca Demartini of the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, and Dr Glenn Kefford from the School of Political Science and International Studies.

Note: The dashboard is live, and therefore may take a little time to load. 

The election campaign begins

Scott Morrison might need some biblical intervention to move mountains on May 21.

This May 21 election may prove to be as much a test of faith as a test of the polling, sloganeering, preference counting and political tactics that will dominate the next five weeks.

At its heart will be a test of the question Scott Morrison posed when he won unexpectedly from Bill Shorten three years ago: Can miracles happen twice? Or can we expect a more earthly phenomenon of lightning that only strikes once in the same place?

Make no mistake. If a win in 2019 was a miracle, then a win in 2022 will be something more than a miracle. Or a testament to the misreading of the electorate by Labor, the pollsters and the line-up of pundits who have written off Scott Morrison.

A win this time around will have Morrison achieving what no Australian Prime Minister has done for almost 20 years: two consecutive elected terms in office. That will be a tough ask, according to UQ’s Professor Graeme Orr, particularly given it comes in the wake of very public challenges like COVID-19, war, fires, floods, and even low wage growth.

If he pulls it off, it may create a period of political stability many Australians crave, one in which we move on from the revolving door style of leadership that has defined Australian democracy since Labor decided it was a good idea to ditch Kevin Rudd before he had a chance to take it to the polls as Prime Minister.

That’s all very well if your idea of stability is a government with Scott Morrison at its head. The authority he applies over his government will only grow to be unchallengeable if he pulls off a victory this time around.

The victory will also, rightly, be attributable to his skill as a campaigner, the acceptance by the population that attributes many of his own people deride – the Dad dagginess, the reliance on slick slogans and the one-man band style of decision-making – is in touch with the attributes the electorate likes.

The government has worked hard in recent months to turn this campaign into a campaign about security. And that means our personal economic security as interest rates start to rise and our national security as the world shakes from the rise of China and the display of Russian authoritarianism in Europe.

Both attributes are traditionally natural assets for the Coalition, but UQ political scientist Dr Glenn Kefford makes the point that own goals have strongly muted the Government’s message there.

The Coalition has also had to defend itself on a few counts. For one is the question of debt, which has risen beyond any previous levels over a decade of conservative government (and the trend was on before COVID19 started running up the bills). The other is just how much we’ve done to prepare for a shifting defence landscape over the past decade when the Coalition has had control of diplomacy and defence spending.

Just as important is the question of who is Anthony Albanese. Labor has plotted this campaign to overcome its 2019 failing of spelling out too much detail of its intentions. It has tried to make itself a small target, including not really defining Anthony Albanese, who is an inner-Sydney leftie now defining himself as being at the centre of politics.

That leaves the government with ongoing opportunity to colour in an outline of the Labor leader. Don’t expect any crayon to be left in the pencil case as it turns the attention on him.

What won’t help the government, however, is the distrust of Scott Morrison, who we do know a lot about. He has been captured by the best political slogan of the century, the Betoota Advocate’s description of him as “Scotty from Marketing”. (Sorry marketing friends, but this makes him seem like an insubstantial person, even carrying the diminutive Scotty instead of the possibly authoritative Scott).

Dr Kefford says we will continue to see this time around the influence of the parties that can’t form government – particularly in the type of issues they raise, and are then put to the main parties. In Queensland, there will be a vigorous contest for a sixth Senate seat, which will fall either to the LNP or one of the minor parties of the right, Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, Campbell Newman for the Liberal Democrats or Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

If money talks, it will be no contest that it ends up in the hands of Clive Palmer, who is not only one of the nation’s richest people but who Professor Orr says stole the march on his competitors by “starting to spend an absurd amount money last September’’. The balance of power in a tight Senate might be where the political story of the next three years starts, regardless of who controls the House of Representatives by June.

Scott Morrison should be checking his bible for signs of more miracles, because an election win this time will require him to move mountains. Perhaps he should head to Matthew 21:21: “Jesus replied, Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt…you can say to this mountain ‘Go throw yourself into the sea’ and it will be done.”

Madonna King is one of Australia’s most accomplished journalists, having national awards for her ABC Radio Brisbane Mornings current affairs program. She writes across Fairfax, Crikey, The New Daily and In Queensland, and is a regular contributor to the ABC’s The Drum. Madonna is the author of more than 10 books, including the best-selling Being 14, Fathers and Daughters, and Ten-Ager. She is the biographer of Australian of the Year and UQ Professor Ian Frazer and former treasurer Joe Hockey. In 2018, Madonna served as chair of the Queensland Government’s Anti-Cyberbullying Taskforce, set up in the wake of COAG. A fellow of the prestigious World Press Institute, she has served on the Walkley Advisory Board, and is currently deputy chair of St Leo’s College at UQ. She’s also a proud UQ alumnus.